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It is said in the 18th century the American general Israel Putnam once invited a British general to a novel test of nerves. Both were to sit on barrels of gunpowder, and the fuses were to bit lit. The last man to run away would be the winner. The unnamed British general accepted Putman's challenge. But as the fuses burned, he became increasingly fidgety while Putnam sat calmly, smoking his pipe. At the last moment the British general fled. Putnam stayed seated; he knew that both barrels were filled with onions. For several hundred years the Tower of London was home to a menagerie of wild animals, including a number of lions that later became the basis of a hoax. Dawk's News-Letter for April 2, 1698, announced: "Yesterday being the one April several persons were sent to the Tower of London to watch the annual lion-washing ceremony." This fictitious event continued to attract gullible visitors. Indeed, 158 years later, in 1856, many bought tickets to attend the ceremony. They were unaware of the significance of the date, April 1, or that the lions had been moved to the London Zoo 21 years before.

Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Don't kid yourself. Sensory perception - especially vision - is a figment of your imagination. "What you're experiencing is largely the product of what's inside your head," says psychologist Ron Rensink at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "It's informed by what comes in through your eyes, but it's not directly reflecting it."

When we've got a problem to solve, we don't just use our brains but the rest of our bodies as well, researchers at the University of Wisconsin have determined. The researchers recruited 86 American undergraduates, half of whom were prevented from moving their hands using Velcro gloves that attached to a board. The others were prevented from moving their feet, using Velcro straps attached to another board - but had their hands free. From the other side of an opaque screen, an experimenter asked questions about gears in relation to each other. For example: "If five gears are arranged in a line, and you move the first gear clockwise, what will the final gear do?" The participants solved the problems aloud and were videotaped. The videotapes were analyzed for the number of hand gestures the participants used (hand rotations or "ticking" movements, indicating counting); verbal explanations indicating the subject was visualizing those physical movements; or the use of more abstract mathematical rules, without reference to perceptual-motor processes. The researchers then repeated the experiment and analysis with 111 British adults. The researchers found that the people who were allowed to gesture usually did so, and they also commonly used perceptual-motor strategies in solving the puzzles. The people whose hands were restrained (as well as those who chose not to gesture even when allowed), used abstract, mathematical strategies much more often. Their work will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

During World War I, peace broke out. It was Christmas 1914 on the Western Front. Despite strict orders not to chillax with the enemy, British and German soldiers left their trenches, crossed No Man's Land, and gathered to bury their dead, exchange gifts, and play games. Meanwhile: it's 2017, the West has been at peace for decades, and wow, we suck at trust. Surveys show that, over the past forty years, fewer and fewer people say they trust each other. So here's our puzzle: Why, even in peacetime, do friends become enemies? And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends?

cultivate good memories, with money or without.

The communication may take the form of a direct message conveyed psychically by one friend to the other, a message sent through a medium, or even an intuition or conviction by one friend that the other is dead. Christie-Murray keeps a register of everyone taking part in the scheme and will investigate any messages that are received.